Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

William Law

What a strange thing is it, that a little health, or the poor business of a shop, should keep us so senseless of these great things that are coming so fast upon us!

Frailties | Men |

William James

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.

Chance | Genius | Individual | Men | Mystery | People | Public | Inertia |

William James

The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.

Ideas | Men |

William Law

Through the want of a sincere intention of pleasing God in all our actions, we fall into such irregularities of life as, by the ordinary means of grace, we should have power to avoid.

Comfort | Light | Man | Men | Nature | Order | People | Sensibility | World | Afraid |

William James

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

Birth | Indignation | Inferiority | Injustice | Injustice | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Pain | Taste |

William Matthews

It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.

Men | Suffering | Happiness |

William (Morley Punshon) McFee

It is extraordinary how many emotional storms one may weather in safety if one is ballasted with ever so little gold.

History | Little | Men | Success | Unique | Following |

William James

The path to cheerfulness is to sit cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

Men | Opposition |

William James

When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.

Better | History | Marriage | Men | Protest | Thinking | Thought | Time | Child | Thought |

William Law

It is much more possible for the sun to give out darkness than for God to do or be, or give out anything but blessing and goodness.

Idleness | Means | Method | Power | Spirit | Teach | Time | War | Circumstance |

William Matthews

The petty cares, the minute anxieties, the infinite littles which go to make up the sum of human experience, like the invisible granules of powder, give the last and highest polish to a character.

Life | Life | Men | Tragedy |

William James

There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.

Little | Method | Science | Style | Work |

William James

Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.

Capacity | Conduct | Failure | Men | Will | Failure |

William Matthews

It is in vain to torment oneself over sufferings that one cannot alleviate.

Men | Self-knowledge |

William Melmoth, wrote under pseudonym Sir Thomas Fitzosborne

Upon this principle I imagine it is that some of the finest pieces of antiquity are written in the dialogue manner. Plato and Tully, it should seem, thought truth could never be examined with more advantage than amidst the amicable opposition of well-regulated converse.

Absurd | Circumstances | Contrast | Conversation | Friend | Language | Learning | Lord | Method | Reason | Spirit | Strength | Wonder | World |

William James

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

Appetite | Better | Men | World | Loss |

William James

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

Authority | Civilization | Cruelty | Discipline | Doubt | Duty | Force | Little | Manliness | Men | Opinion | Public | Question | War | Work | Cruelty | Afraid |

William James

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.

Absolute | Ambition | Blush | Education | Feelings | Honor | Individual | Men | Pride | Question | Race | Reason | Right | Shame | System | Time | Worth | Ambition | Old |

William McKinley

I have already transmitted to Congress the report of the naval court of inquiry on the destruction of the battleship Maine in the harbor of Havana during the night of the fifteenth of February. The destruction of that noble vessel has filled the national heart with inexpressible horror. Two hundred and fifty-eight brave sailors and marines and two officers of our Navy, reposing in the fancied security of a friendly harbor, have been hurled to death, grief and want brought to their homes and sorrow to the nation.

Men |

William Morris

O hearken the words of his voice of compassion: "come cling round about me, ye faithful who sicken of the weary unrest and the world's passing fashions! As the rain in mid-morning your troubles shall thicken, but surely within you some godhead doth quicken, as ye cry to me heeding, and leading you home."

Daughter | Men | Wise |